26 June 2012

‘Alternative’ medicine is just as anti-scientific as creationism

The concept of ‘complementary and alternative medicine’
(CAM) carries a tacit rebuke of ‘mainstream’ medicine. CAM advocates use the terms
‘complementary’ and ‘alternative’ to suggest that mainstream medicine is only
one option on the healthcare menu, and therefore it has no
right to claim that it’s the only valid kind of medicine. The CAM faithful
shore up their position with postmodernist twaddle that rejects the very idea that
there are objective, testable and efficacious methods to determine what kinds
of medicine work, or don’t.

This sort of ‘my-truth-is-just-as-true-as-your-truth’
subjectivism is used by pushers of homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture and
other woo to paint science-based medicine as a conspiracy by arrogant ‘experts’
and know-it-all scientists trying to shut down the competition. It’s a good way
for woo-mongers to play the heroic rebel fighting against the tyranny of the
establishment. This victim/rebel mentality is on display in this excerpt from
the introduction to a CAM conference:

The popular
experiences of alternative healing, DIY and free and open source technology are
everyday experiences of the contemporary individual. These experiences are
being conceptualised by Fuller (2010) as ‘anti-establishment science movements’
which tacitly challenge the highly socially positioned ‘scientific expert’, the
social agent of the establishment science. In the field of health, these
movements are challenging the biomedical domination in the field. One of the
responses to deal with the authority challenges has been the absorption of
selective alternative healing practices (such as acupuncture, homeopathy) into
the established health systems while reasserting the central place of
biomedicine with continued usage of the referents ‘alternative’ and
‘complementary’.

Neurologist and woo-buster Dr Steven Novella has shown in a blog post just how full of fail this paragraph is. Here’s my favourite part of his
savaging:

The notion
that “science” is just another narrative is absurd. At its core science is a
set of methods for looking fairly and objectively at all available evidence,
isolating variables so we can make some judgments about their individual
contributions, carefully defining terms, and using consistent and valid logic.
If “science” is rejected as a socially determined narrative, then which aspect
of science are they rejecting, specifically? In practice what CAM advocates are
promoting is the selective use (cherry picking) of evidence, not isolating
variables (mixing variables so that effects are confused), using sloppy
methods, poorly defining terms, and using invalid or inconsistent logic. If you
read the criticisms of the “social agents of the establishment science”, for
example here or at Science-based Medicine, you will find countless
documentations of such bad intellectual behavior on the part of CAM advocates.
That is the core of our criticism – bad thinking, bad evidence, bad logic
leading to unreliable conclusions that all seem to be biased in a certain
direction.

CAM-ists and creationists
share a similar attitude towards facts and reality: they twist, ignore and
cherrypick the former to create their own imaginary version of the latter.